There are 16 candidates in this fall’s San Francisco mayoral race, and KALW News is interviewing all of them.

So far, we’ve heard from an assessor-recorder, a state senator, two supervisors (one current and one former), and an entrepreneur – all of whom boast clean rap sheets and long resumes. And then there’s Paul Currier.

Currier is a Bay Area native and a son of the ‘60s. And as KALW’s Ben Trefny discovered in this interview, Currier has an interesting story and political vision for San Francisco.

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BEN TREFNY: Can you tell me where you live?

PAUL CURRIER: Currently I live at the John F. Kennedy Towers, which is a San Francisco Housing Authority Project, unlikely located at the corner of Sacramento and Fillmore. So I’m in Pacific Heights, which has not been a neighborhood of mine for … ever, since March, since before March. I spent the last three years living in the Tenderloin at Golden Gate and Jones, right next to St. Anthony’s, at a building called the Hotel Boyd, one of the older hotels in the TL.

I went to Berkeley years ago, UC Berkeley. I grew up in Palo Alto. I was born at Stanford but earned my degree at UC Berkeley.

BEN TREFNY: That must make you conflicted, a little bit.

CURRIER: It irritates the people from Stanford when you tell them, “Yeah, I was born at Stanford, but I was smart enough to go to Cal.” At Berkeley, I was trained to be the governor of the state of California in a very small program called the Political Internship Program. It was very difficult to get in, and once I was in, I worked as a congressional aide for Ron Dellums for a couple years. I did prison casework for Ron. All of the Black Panthers were my clients and it was a lot of fun.

I graduated in ’75 and decided not to go into law, and not to go into public service as a politician and in politics, which was a dream of mine back then. But the idea of being professionally dishonest and lying to people professionally and getting paid for it … the criminal nature of the whole system.

I grew up and lived through the ‘60s, so in the culture wars, I was on the side of the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles. I ended up in federal prison for psychedelics, so I’m the only candidate on the ballot that has done time, federal time, for controlled substances. When I say things like I want to end the war on drugs, I actually mean it. I’m serious about it. We have millions of people in America that need to get their lives back, and the war on drugs has been not only a failure, it’s been a war on America. We need to end the wars.

I’m a peace candidate, obviously.

I came back into politics in 2007 when I heard Barack Obama speak at the Bill Graham Civic. I looked at him, I listed to him, and I thought, “You know, this man just might be President of the United States. I think I’ll work for this guy.” I did internet organizing for the Obama campaign as a volunteer; I created a group called the Obama Brigade that was 1,800 internet organizers and we organized online. We called for the April 19th Unity Rally of 2008. We had thousands of rallies take place on that Saturday all over America. We had everyone commit to 100 voter phone calls and we organized 3 to 5 million voter-to-voter phone calls from all over America into Pennsylvania; we delivered the campaign for Obama. The rest is history.

So what had occurred to me in running for mayor, was if I claimed as I do that San Francisco is a cesspool of corruption and our local government is being run by organized crime, the only way to make that case (since no judge will listen to it and no prosecutor will prosecute it), is to prosecute it myself and take the case to the people of San Francisco, and that’s what I’m doing with my candidacy.

TREFNY: So, eradicating corruption in city government is one of your platform points, then. First of all, how would you go about doing that? And then I’d like to hear some of your other primary priorities as mayor.

CURRIER: How do you stop it?

TREFNY: That’s the question.

CURRIER: That’s a good question. San Francisco’s got a relationship with a lot of the private banks that have been robbing America blind. I’d like to go ahead and copy the state bank of North Dakota and create a publicly-owned county bank of San Francisco. A lot of people don’t understand how money is created. This would not only give us $300-500 million of new revenue on an annual basis for San Francisco, but it would also allow us to create $5-10 billion – not million, billion – of new money for infrastructure projects in the city to start. Within 10 to 15 years, we should easily have a $100-200 billion capital base.

TEFNY: That’s borrowing against the bank’s holdings?

CURRIER: That’s actually creating wealth against the bank’s holdings. So, we would set up a San Francisco community development corporation. There’s no reason why the kids at Twitter, when they wanted to get $3 million to start, there’s no reason why they had to go to Sandhill Road. They could have gone to our San Francisco Community Development Corporation and gotten a $3 million angel funding grubstake, get started, and we would have had an equity share in Twitter. There wouldn’t be any of this discussion of some Twitter tax break. It would be irrelevant. We would have a piece of the action, and if the company grew to a 10 to 15 billion dollar company and we had 30% because we funded them, and we put in our funding that they would stay in San Francisco, we could do that.

TREFNY: What if we gave Twitter $3 million and it failed?

CURRIER: That’s what happens with venture capital. One out of 40 firms does fail. But one out of 40 firms makes it like a rocket launch. And that’s why there’s a venture capital community on Sandhill Road. They’re not there because they lose money on every deal. They’re there because every once in a while they make a phenomenal amount of money on a Google, a Sun Microsystems, a Cisco. Moving right along, public banks, and a public community development corporation to help people realize their dreams and opportunities, that moves right into this idea of housing.

This principle of housing is so important because 65% of us rent. Everybody in San Francisco needs the opportunity for a piece of the pie, not pie in the sky. So, I’d like to see San Francisco seize the housing authority from the Federal Housing Administration and turn all of our San Francisco housing authority properties into community-owned land trusts and land co-ops.

TREFNY: So, I’d like to get very quick responses, even just one word or one-sentence responses, on the following issues, terms, words, that have to do with San Francisco in this election.

CURRIER: Let’s try it.

TREFNY: Litter.

CURRIER: Litter is a huge problem. Um… First of all, that word “um” is a verbal pause before usually people want to lie. The island of Palawan in the Philippines, they have a litter law that’s enforced by the kids. The kids give you these little tickets and they’re worth 200 pesos. If you throw a cigarette butt down, it’ll cost you money. What that means for Palawan is that the place is spotless. It’s paradise without trash. We could do that in San Francisco.

TREFNY: Muni.

CURRIER: Muni, I believe in getting a clean sheet of paper and doing a whole system redesign. We have the money to fund that with our new San Francisco public-owned bank. I lived in Prague for four and half years; there’s no reason why we can’t design and build a very great underground system of light rails. There’s no reason why you can’t be from one side of the city to the other in 20 minutes.

TREFNY: Parking.

CURRIER: Parking. I believe in, um…

TREFNY: Are you about to lie?

CURRIER: Well, I don’t have a car right now. So, I’m grasping. I understand how important cars are. San Francisco would be great if everybody did not have a car. The problem with San Francisco and cars is 80% of our traffic in San Francisco is San Francisco traffic by San Franciscans using our streets. In terms of parking meters, originally the concept of parking meters was to make sure there were spaces available for small businesses, so that people could drive there and shop locally. I support that concept. I really support the concept of having a much better Muni, so people can shop and live without having to use cars. For that case, bicycles are probably a much better use of our energy than automobiles.

Some of these ideas are not San Francisco today, they’re San Francisco in 10, 20, 50, and 100 years. So, we need to move these directions because that means we can do it in one or two years.